Monideepa Tarafdar named Association for Information Systems Fellow

Indian American professor is a world leader in her field with many influential papers on impacts of modern technology use and AI

By Arun Kumar

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) has named Monideepa Tarafdar, an Indian American professor at the Isenberg School of Management at University of Massachusetts Amherst, an AIS Fellow.

Tarafdar, Isenberg’s Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor in Information Systems, is a world leader in her field and has published many influential papers concerning the positive and negative impacts of modern technology use and artificial intelligence (AI).

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The fellowship was awarded Dec 15, 2024, at the International Conference on Information Systems in Bangkok, Thailand, according to a university press release.

The AIS Fellow Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the information systems discipline in research, teaching, and service. The fellow is also expected to have made significant global contributions to the information systems discipline as well as outstanding local contributions in the context of their country and region.

“Being an AIS Fellow is a recognition of the cool topics that we, as professors of information systems, study and teach,” said Tarafdar, who was appointed editor-in-chief of Journal of AIS in July. “It’s also an exciting reminder of the huge opportunity and responsibility we face as we make sense of how technologies such as AI affect every aspect of our work and personal lives.

“I’ve been fortunate to have studied and written about such topics,” added Tarafdar, who began teaching at UMass Amherst in 2021 and serves as the Information Systems PhD prpgram coordinator. “I’m also happy that my students, colleagues in the information systems discipline, and collaborators from the world of practice and policy have found my work impactful.”

One of the first scholars to identify and study technostress, her work has influenced other scholars, companies, and governments. Her recent work extends to examining the dark and bright sides of social media use as well as understanding bias in artificial intelligence-based hiring.

Educated in her native India, Tarafdar studied physics, math, and chemistry as an undergraduate and earned a master’s degree in engineering. She earned a PhD in management, specializing in information systems and strategy, from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, where she was the first female doctoral student to graduate with a major in MIS.

She has taught at the University of Toledo (Ohio) and at Lancaster University in England and held visiting scholar positions at MIT Sloan, the LSE, and Weizenbaum Internet Institute in Germany, among other schools.